skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not WinPhone and Blackberry that cause this statistic, it's the (literally) billions of featurephones that just have crummy Java applications and a mobile browser. There are twice as many featurephone users in India as there are humans in the United States.
Also: "Brogrammers Wanted: Kixeye, the gaming startup that proves Silicon Valley’s frat-house culture isn’t going away anytime soon."

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/...
here's my version (Strange Loop 2012 slides - Monads in python). A bit simpler, but not as thorough.

http://www.dustingetz.com/2012/09/24/StrangeLoop2012-monads-...
I hate it when they put stickers on laptops.
CoFounderLabs.com is about as close as currently exists.
I think Anders Hejlsberg knows a few other languages.
>If you want to package them with your device, all that they require is that you talk with them and ensure you pass the compatibility toolkit.

>OEMs do not pay Google in exchange for bundling Google Apps

Do you have a reference to those two points? A lot of the small Android tablet OEMs have a lot of trouble getting Google apps.
So much this. The calculator comment was in no way racist.
I noticed that in the url when searching there is a parameter "?utf8=✓". I just thought the use of ✓ was a little odd, and was wondering why this choice was made.
I asked for sources? Are you confusing me for other people who replied?

And I never said anything even remotely pedantic. (Thinking gluten is a carb is not pedantic - it's wrong.)

You have been told you were wrong from a whole bunch of different people, but somehow decided they were all me. It's interesting to speculate on why you did that. A mental defense against being told you were wrong perhaps?

It's time for you to go restart your eduction on this matter from scratch - and not from me.
It's great, my favorite episode is "Drive". I just wish they could do it regularly.
This is fantastic! I've been considering this idea for a while - it 1) could become a legitimate way to invest in tech startups, and 2) could inform smarter investment - the best startups can get spotted faster. Great job making it!

EDIT: it is fairly easy to game it, might want to carefully pick a set of sites (news/blogs/etc.) to scrape to impose some controls?
Er... yes? But I suppose every piece of data on a computer could be considered a number as well.
I don't think your solution is comparable to Spanner, because you said somewhere you have to write custom merge functions for data. Spanner doesn't impose that on application developers.

Your system sounds really interesting though, thanks for writing it up. For most people, the hardware requirement of a Spanner-like solution does seem impractical, so maybe that's a good tradeoff.

I'm curious what industry this is in? Or what company? 17ms is really low! I wish more sites would put that much effort into their latency.
> his recollection is being strongly influenced by his own personal biases.

He wisely documented all the abusive incidents. He doesn't need to "recall" anything.
excellent recommendation. Just to be clear, I agree the opportunity cost of book reading.

But those who cant cannot afford the time and money, Doesn't it seems to be a much lower opportunity cost.
Because it can be—UTF-8 is enabled. It's kind of cute to use a character from the extended set to indicate that.
An unlocked iPhone 4 is still around $400. That's not really low end.
I had a lot of difficulty finding good learning resources for developers. Most are aimed at non-programmers. I had quite a few questions answered on http://drupal.stackexchange.com/, which is a good starting point.
I think calling this "one responsive page" understates the true size of Microsoft's presence and the difficulties associated with not getting a design-by-committee pile of gunk out the other side[1].

1. http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html
I have a Touchpad with Android on it too :)

I would disagree on the "reputable" part. Which reputable sites are they distributed on?
This is not true in New York City, where I am. Developers who are good with a given PHP framework (Drupal, Symfony, etc) will make something like $60 to $70 an hour. The top Rails devs will make at least the same amount, and usually a little more than that.

Sounds like more developers who need to dramatically raise their rates. I'm in NYC and I charge more than double that for iOS development. I sit next to a good freelance PHP guy charging $85-95 / hr who is slammed with work, ironically mostly for Wordpress. He should be charging more, but he's getting there :)

And the top Rails devs in NYC are definitely charging way more than that; I know guys doing $150 / hr and up.

http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com
Regardless of your expectation, the fact is that they are related to the search term. Clicking "Downloads" after searching for "skype" takes me to this URL:

http://search.microsoft.com/en-us/DownloadResults.aspx?q=sky...

It's clearly searching downloads for "skype". And failing horribly.
This makes no sense at all to me. If you're getting 2-3 people a day following you, and then sending you hateful DMs when you follow back, you seriously keep refollowing random people who will presumably be harassing you? It's not punishing anyone to put a bit of an effort in to seeing if the person seems legit before following them back.
"To be productive at Rails, you have to know what gems are out there. You need to keep up with the gems, because they really are central to the productivity boost you can get from Rails. There is a gem for almost any bit of functionality you need, you only have to know which gems are good. If you find yourself writing large amounts of custom code in Rails, then either you are truly tackling a novel problem that no one has ever dealt with before, or you are simply unaware of the gem that you should be using."

This made me smile:

:%s/Rails/Drupal/g

:%s/gem/module/g

"To be productive at Drupal, you have to know what modules are out there. You need to keep up with the modules, because they really are central to the productivity boost you can get from Drupal. There is a module for almost any bit of functionality you need, you only have to know which modules are good. If you find yourself writing large amounts of custom code in Drupal, then either you are truly tackling a novel problem that no one has ever dealt with before, or you are simply unaware of the module that you should be using."
Tips From The Other Side
I just downloaded a bingo card from Freerepublic. Say some more stuff.
This line of logic works to a point, but if 2-3 strangers are following you per day on twitter and then when you follow them back, they send you hateful messages, wouldn't you consider at least getting to know the person/changing your behavior? I get that you wouldn't think its a big deal if it just happened a few times, but the guy is screaming that it was happening 2-3 times a day and we are wondering how he possibly could have seen this coming. Seems pretty simple to me.
When In Git
Are you really saying that Skype shouldn't be in the section of MS' "Search" page called "Downloads" when I search for Skype? What is the purpose of "Downloads" then? Guess what, when I click the support button after I've searched for Skype, I expect to find support-related article about Skype, too.

It is no different than expecting to see images of my search term when I click on "images" at Google.
Wow! Fun!

Any hope for an app?
Just for the sake of explanation, here are some of the reasons (I'm a geophysist, currently working in the oil industry, but my dissertation work relied heavily on the Chikyu (the ship in question)):

1: The ocean is the only place where it's feasible. The continents have much, much thicker crust (40-70km) than the ocean basins (7-15km). Areas of exposed oceanic crust (e.g. Iceland) have much thicker than normal oceanic crust.

Beyond that, it's (slightly) easier to "drill" through water than through rock. There are a still a _lot_ of challenges involved in deep-water riser drilling. You don't just have a what's basically a steel rod going down (as you would with riserless drilling), you have to have a system that's capable of returning fluids and maintaining high pressure going all the way down to the seafloor (and below, once you case the well). However, it's still faster to deploy the riser than it is to drill through solid rock. At any rate, I'm getting sidetracked. The locations where they're looking to drill to the moho are in relatively shallow water (3-4 km) compared to the water depths that the Chikyu has already drilled in.

2: You're misunderstanding how drilling works. :) In some sense, what you've described is exactly how it works. (Just think of the drillbit as the robot.) However, you have to overcome the pressures at the depth you're drilling at (otherwise the hole will collapse, among other things) and you need an efficient way to return the cuttings (waste material) to the surface. Thus: drilling mud. You circulate pressurized (and very dense, so that the pressure increases with depth) fluid that flushes the cuttings back to the surface and keeps the borehole open. (It's an oversimplification, but that's the basic idea.) In some cases (e.g. coil tubing rigs), this fluid is even what drives the drillbit.

At any rate, hopefully that helps illuminate things a touch. :)
Why is the Bid/Ask spread so high right now for STMs stock? http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=STM
Legalistic isn't the term - Orwellian is. The Supreme Court has legally defined interstate commerce to mean intrastate, trade to mean possession, and probable to mean possible. Their decisions have increasingly been unconstitutional.

They threw out all hope of remaining remotely constitutional when they ruled in Gonzales v. Raich.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Yahoo Chief Marissa Mayer Welcomes New Baby Boy
The existence of bingo cards is not an argument, even if patio has made it so easy for us to generate them. You may find the following article interesting: http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html

> This tendency reaches its most florid manifestation in the "ideological bingo games". See for example "Skeptical Sexist Bingo", feminist bingo, libertarian troll bingo, anti-Zionist bingo, pro-Zionist bingo, and so on. If you Google for these you can find thousands, which is too bad because every single person who makes one of these is going to Hell.
Searching on Google and then clicking some items in the horizontal list at the top of the page (Maps/Images/etc) switches to the corresponding search.

Although to me, the "63,100 results" indicates that "All Microsoft" is a search category. The items next to it (Downloads...) use the same font so they look like alternate categories.
Entertainment Weekly puts smartphone in 1000 magazines
Ask HN: How to sell?
So, I've always been the introverted guy that knew lots about tech and I seriously feel it's time that I learn something new, not a new programming language or concept... but something I'm very afraid of, which is to sell.

Is there any good books to it? How do I earn the courage to go a place, look awesome and end up closing a deal?

Thanks a lot.
if the site actually gets used I'd probably just create an API and let others play..
Thank you for posting this. I thought the story was fishy too. Hopefully everyone reading this knows you can't generally trace an IP to an exact home address without help from the ISP.

People are WAY too eager to explain that away with "oh he must have cross checked it with his registry of friends IP addresses." Nope. As the article notes, Traynor said the method his "IT friend" used was "almost identical" to ipttackeronline.com, which does not provide exact addresses.

Great point about the police procedure for handling credible death threats, too. We don't even have to get into the twitter stuff.

Why would he lie? For attention and sympathy, of course. People do it all the time.
Rapper Performs Microsoft Store Destroys Computers *Warning Graphic*
I have my X61t, with 1400x1050 res 12" display, hooked up to my HP IPS 24" 1920x1200 res display. It's a good combo for portable (yet usable res for real work) and then even better when it's docked at home.
One phenomenon I've seen a lot is racism/sexism/prejudice of some other sort given free rein because there is no self criticism in that area.

Because only stupid people are sexist and racist. We are smart, ergo, we cannot be sexist or racist.
I think I will be taking your advice to heart, Dan.

>Don’t blog.

Every time I see a post like this I feel horrible about not blogging, but it's nice to hear that... I really don't think I'm cut out for it.
Show HN: Pull pages out of Bing cache with one line of code
Tell HN: Raise your freelance rates
I just saw this comment about top PHP and Rails devs in NYC charging $65-75 / hr:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4604780

Not picking on the comment author, but I know that the top devs in NYC are charging way more than that. It took me years to realize that I should be charging way more than that as well, and I still need a gentle reminder every now and then that I'm a professional, I help people make money, and I should charge accordingly.

I'm not selling anything here, just a friendly reminder to HN freelancers that you're probably not charging enough and you need to raise your rates. I recently found this ebook (not mine, no affiliation, no gain for me if you buy it) to be very helpful and worth every single penny that I spent on it. I made it back 100x over within a couple days.

http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com

I know what most of you are thinking: "that's fine for those guys, but I can't raise my rates because I'm not a rockstar programmer / located in the right place / a scam artist / someone with a huge following."

But you probably can, and it'll probably be easier than you think. I just landed a job at $150 / hr, when I had been charging $95 / hr. And literally all I did was change my rate on the estimate form. The client didn't even mention it.

You can do this.
Talk to PayPal. Their micropayments accounts are 5% + $0.05 per transaction, so the fee on $1 would be only $0.10.
Aren't all software purchases just a license? You don't own the product right? The company that made it owns it.
When I was in high school, if a guy called me "raghead", I'd call him "white trash" back.

I didn't see it as me being racist, just as retaliation.

But then again, I didn't see the other guy as racist, just as an asshole.

I was eccentric and the mean kids wanted to pick on me.

I assumed that their basic motivation was malice, so had I been white (so they couldn't use mild racial slurs against me) they'd just have found something else nasty to say.

I put that into a separate category than racist, which to me meant something like the members of the KKK or the Nazi party.

Is this a false distinction?

I get the same vibe about the mentioned workplace, like it's a bunch of jock assholes (and definitely meets the definitions of "hostility" and "harassment", for what it's worth).
If you don't use WWAN on your x230 (or even have the card), you can put an mSATA SSD into the M-PCIE socket. Then you can have an ssd for your OS, and a hard drive for mass storage.
I don't think it implies Charlie agreed at all, it actually implies the opposite. That's quite an ugly statement.

I'd personally be very hesitant to partner with Adam after reading this, considering how this incident played out. Well... who am I kidding, if I had the opportunity to found the next Quora I'd jump on it, but I'd be watching for knives the whole time..
First, it's LANGUAGE_NONE not 'und'. Second, while I could go on how you should use field_get_items instead, it's very very likely you are missing some concepts here an you want a formatter, a whole display mode etc. You very rarely need that level of plumbing.
I think he read the parent post as an indictment of the author and not a summary of valid issues with the company.

I know.
To be fair, they (the oil industry) already developed pretty much _all_ of the technology in question. Scientific drilling just applies the oil industry's methods to academic projects. (There are a few exceptions, particularly with regards to coring.) Furthermore, the companies that provide the expertise in question are the service companies (e.g. Schlumberger, Halliburton, etc), not the companies that are directly in search of oil.
If you can't wish for unlimited wishes, wish for unlimited genies. Or in this case, unlimited Twitter accounts earning $10,000 of funny money per account.
A few simple hacks to get up feeling less groggy
Are these just...random databases from university domains?
I use MongoDB because for my specific use case (one user object with lots of related data) it is significantly faster, easier to manage, easier to scale, easier to debug and most importantly easier to develop.

It doesn't mean that it is appropriate for all use cases.
We don't fail to drill more geothermals because we are incapable of it, we don't do it because the cost/benefit ratio isn't favorable in most places. Since this isn't about advancing technology, but applying what we already have to this task, this project isn't going to change that.

There's all kinds of things that are possible, but not profitable. And especially when it comes to energy, "profitable" isn't just about money; putting in 2 Joules to create the ability to generate 1 isn't economically practical any more than a company that burns 2 dollars to make 1 is.
Seems like Hetzner might be a great fit for you: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4s

60 euros buys you 2x3tb of storage. It's raid 1 but I guess you could ask to have it raid 0.
And to put it in even more prespective, we're just talking about drilling through the equivalent of the skin of an apple.
A good thought, but C’s syntax makes it a bit hairy to explicate that you’re using an integral value as a pointer:

#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdio.h>

struct big_data { int i; };

void f(intptr_t p) {
printf("%d\n", ((struct big_data*)p)->i);
}

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
struct big_data data = { 42 };
intptr_t p = &data;
f(p);
return 0;
}

So there’s no real pedagogical gain. If someone understands what “a pointer is just an integer” means, then they probably understand pointers already.
Nice one (idea): in my pockets, I've still an iphone, a bunch of keys, credit cards and a pass card for the office...
Computer Glitch brings Melbourne traffic to a standstill
Traffic is at a standstill in Melbourne , Australia. A computer glitch has shut down the automated traffic signs, and in turn caused the closure of main tunnels and traffic routes. What's worse, they still don't know what is causing the software glitch!
I read this paper over a year ago... but where does it talk about Statecharts??? I searched through and don't see that.

Maybe I took something completely different away from the paper that other people did.

One was that the whole thing was based on argument, not evidence, or even examples.

The other was that it seemed to match up the "web architecture", almost exactly. They advocate functional programming, and using relational calculus.

That is exactly how the web is structured -- a CGI script is essentially always a pure function. And then a SQL database is based on relational calculus (more or less).

I don't believe they mentioned that anywhere in the paper.

But I do believe that the web's programming model is a big part of what made it popular. A lot of programmers seem to complain about the lack of state in web apps, and will create elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions to try to reintroduce it. But I think it's actually a good thing, and they don't understand the benefits of the archtitecture (scaling, among other things).
I despise "responsive design". For years, web sites worked great on my iPhone, iPad and laptop. More and more often, I'm getting web sites that are nearly unusable on my iPhone as they become "responsive".

While I appreciate making bigger touch targets and lighter-weight images, I really like being able to scroll around horizontally and vertically, zoom in on stuff I want to see details of, zoom out and get an overview, etc., and as soon as you make your design responsive, I lose that.
Remember pressures. Any fiery, earth-destroying demon/alien would consider where we live to be incredibly inhospitable, on the grounds that if they actually come up here, they will explode. And not even nuclear-style "wipe out all life on Earth, ha ha ha!" type explosion, but just a dead-fiery-earth-destroying-demon/alien-making-a-short-lived-unpleasant-mess sort of explode. You wouldn't want to be standing right next to it, but on the grand earth-destroying scale it'd be barely a blip.
Good way to monetize DoS attacks ;-)
Life and The College Years
Interesting that they seem to be confirming previous analysis that shows that the rear of the plane is indeed the safest part of the plane.

> flying in first class would have been fatal. Passengers in the middle of the cabin might have suffered concussions and broken ankles, while those in the rear could have walked away

which agrees with this analysis
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/4... which says

> the trend was clear: The rear cabin (seats located behind the trailing edge of the wing) had the highest average survival rate at 69 percent. The overwing section had a 56 percent survival rate, as did the coach section ahead of the wing. First/business-class sections (or in all-coach planes, the front 15 percent) had an average survival rate of just 49 percent.
Why did you post this analysis?

No, really, I'm curious. What drove you to do this?

Who cares whether he's lying? (And why do you care?)
A function is a type, is a set, is a number. And that, frankly, is difficult to get around. Coming from the C / Java world, it is hard to understand that "types" are really sets (in a mathematical sense) which in turn, are numbers (i.e. the set of natural integers), and a function (in terms of the value it returns) is a number as well and can be considered as being an "operation" upon a set, i.e., put set A into set B and one has set C. Function == Type == Set == Number, or, perhaps, a Number is simply an instance of a Set which in turn is another way of saying Type, so, basically, Function == Set. What makes it conceptually difficult is that the word "function" entails "operation", which entails "time", when, really, one could think of "function" as sort of being "those steps one has to go through in order to define a set of type S".

A set is a theorem, so now we have, Theorum == Type == Set == Number. A function is simply the way of defining or proving the Theorum, e.g. if set A == B, and B == C, then A == C is a function, which itself is a Set, conjoining A and C.

The "type" of an object (integer, char, whatever) is really a Set, and the way to construct that set (also being itself a set) is a function, which is what one might call a "program".

These things are different ways of looking at the same thing. A "type" (set) is the Theorum, its proof is the function (program which constructs the Theorum or Set).

The only difference between function/program and Set/Theorum is the former "constructs" the later, the former being "temporal" the latter being "eternal" or put it another way, the former being the "building blocks" the latter being the "finished product".

So yes pointers are numbers, which though are Sets, constructed by functions and these sets construct the Theorums. The type is the Theorum, the function is the construction of that Theorum, done vis-a-vis Sets and that is what (IMHO) that thing which we call "computer science" is all about. :-)